By Wesley Smith

This appeared earlier this week on Mr. Smith’s superb blog, http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/

Wesley Smith

In the five years since Terri Schiavo was slowly dehydrated to death, her loving family has been subjected to repeated callousness and intentional cruelties–canards about their motives, personal vituperation, etc. That’s life in the public eye. But now a new line of despicability has been crossed that cannot be allowed to stand.

Fox’s Family Guy stooped even beneath its usual scatological obsessions to literally mock a dead woman, whose only “crime” was to have been profoundly cognitively disabled. The episode opens with a fictional school play, Terri Schiavo: The Musical. In it, Terri is depicted as having been hooked up to every conceivable machine, a total lie since all she needed to remain alive was food and water delivered through a tube. But the facts this case have been continually misstated from the beginning, so that is nothing new.

But what is novel–and truly beneath contempt, not only because it mocks and degrades Terri, but also, everyone now living with serious cognitive impairments–are the lyrics. “Michael Schiavo” says, “She’s a vegetable,” and the chorus responds, “We hate vegetables!” to which the audience breaks up in laughter. Later she is depicted as having “mashed potato brains,” which are poured into a bowl, and being “the most expensive plant you’ll ever see.”

Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her brother Bobby and sister Suzanne Schindler Vitadamo

This doesn’t just mock a now dead woman who can’t defend herself. It is hate speech against people similarly situated.

Indeed, the V-word should be rendered just as societally unacceptable as the N-word has thankfully become. Both epithets serve the same purpose, that is, to demean, dehumanize, and exclude–so as to open the door to oppression, exploitation, and killing.

And imagine how those with loved ones with these conditions must feel seeing such cruel mockery. I asked Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, to react. He told me: “These people have no regard for disabled people and their families, or the pain such mockery causes. What kind of a human being would think this was funny. …

If you think the Family Guy should be jerked off the air–just as the show would if it mocked, say Michael Vick, over his race–you might want to make your voice known. Here is someone you might want to contact in protest:

Ms. Gail Berman, President, FOX Broadcasting Company, P.O. Box 900 Beverly Hills, CA 90213 (310) 369-1000E-Mail: askfox@foxinc.com.